After the loss of their son, Jonathan (Milo Ventimiglia; Heroes) and Addie (Sarah Shahi; The L Word) are trying to put their lives back together. Addie is grieving, and losing herself in a wine bottle, while Jonathan devotes himself to finishing his new novel. Things take a frightening turn one night when their home is broken into by a group of men wearing gas masks trying to kill them.

This is about as conventional as a horror movie gets. The couple who are going through a hard time, forced to find the will to fight and live when faced with an uncommon danger. Even our villains being literally faceless intruders who can’t have any reason to try to kill this unassuming couple plays right into the ideas present in so many other horror films. Ventimiglia and Shahi offer good performances, and even get to show what it would be like to be parents when Rachel (Sara Paxton) frantically knocks on their door to escape the gas mask men. Rachel’s presence is the catalyst for the bizarre and unexplainable happenings in the film.

The title seems to imply that Static is going to have some blending of the paranormal and the technological, like White Noise, The Ring, and countless others before it. I feel like the title is a red herring in this case, but I have no idea what the purpose of that misdirection is having seen the film now. I could speculate, but we’d quickly get into a spoilery territory and as lackluster as the film is, I’d hate to make anyone’s viewing of it worse by ruining the premise. If I’m right, then they could have chosen a title that is more specific and relevant to this story and managed to pull off the same misdirect.

I have no idea why this was released on a 3D Blu-ray. You expect 3D films to play with the extra dimension a bit, and you expect 3D horror movies to blatantly stick things at the camera to exploit the effect, but Static is an extremely two dimensional film, with no reason for anyone to ever have to watch this in 3D. For that matter, there’s not much reason to watch it on Blu-ray. The entire movie takes place over the course of one night, except for the last couple of scenes which are at dawn on the shore of a lake, and not particularly amazing to look at.

The only special feature is an audio commentary with the writer, producer, and editor. Available on 3D Blu-ray and DVD from Cinedigm on October 8.

Joe Sanders is a podcaster, playwright, and college instructor in Kalamazoo, MI. He has a master's degree in playwriting and a bachelor's degree in creative writing from Western Michigan University, where he currently teaches thought and writing, and is the host of the Quote Unquote Guilty podcast, part of the Word Salad Network.